


Through The Darkness

by Kastaka



Category: The Kiss - Inna Ruda (Painting)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-12
Updated: 2020-12-12
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:00:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28029678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kastaka/pseuds/Kastaka
Summary: An angel, a cat, and the worlds they travelled through
Comments: 5
Kudos: 7
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Through The Darkness

**Author's Note:**

  * For [oxymora (oxymoron)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/oxymoron/gifts).



The first place that the angel deposited me was by the side of a lake.  
I was just a kitten then, and hadn't developed my innate suspicion for the world, especially the various worlds that we visited through the portal.  
The long grasses were perfect for hide and seek, the insects surprisingly easy to hunt - they seemed to be almost confused that a predator such as me existed - and tasty once you got through the scratchy crunchy bits.  
Fish were rather more elusive, and being damp got rather cold.

The lady in the house didn't know what to make of me either, but I did my best soft warm cute act and she had soon taken me in and let me dream sweetly by the fire.  
Her little wooden hut was quite acceptable; a little draughty, maybe, but there was a good threadbare rug and a surplus of fish heads I was extremely happy to help her with.  
While she was overawed by the angel when he came to pick me up, I think she was rather disappointed to lose my soft fur and satisfied rumbling purr.

The second place that the angel deposited me was a dusty savannah.  
Here the small furry animals were rather more canny, and I had to stalk them by night - they burrowed from the heat in the day, and I didn't feel much like chasing them in the beating sun either.  
Once, I saw a larger, sleeker, shadowier version of myself looking down curiously from a tree. But I fluffed myself up and hissed, and they clearly decided I was too much effort for a snack, despite my lamentable lack of daytime stealth - or moonlight stealth, for that matter.

I was not best pleased with the storm.  
The clouds were briefly pleasing, blocking out the restless day star and its endless waves of heat, but the scouring wind and swiftly thereafter the beating rain were not the most pleasant of elements to be out in - and there was precious little 'in' around there.  
My beautiful white fur was stained red with iron mud by the time the angel found me huddling behind a small rock.

I must have fallen asleep in his arms, because when I woke up it was dark.  
It was dark all through the time in that place. Things skittered in the darkness. Some of them got too close, but they were kind of slimy and didn't taste all that good.  
I ate them anyway, of course.  
Constant dripping noises and a little brackish water in puddles here and there. Not my favourite.

Finally there were footsteps that sounded like a person, but it wasn't the angel.  
The angel glows, for one thing, and there was still no light in this place. And the angel wears a fairly short kind of chiton thing, but this person's coat was dragging on the ground.  
I ran over anyway - I really wanted to be out of this place.

At first he didn't take notice of me, even though I meowed my most plaintive meow.  
It was very loud. There wasn't much sound here either. Things tended to try to stay quiet.  
There was nothing for it - I scrambled up that coat, my claws sinking in very satisfactorily.  
He took notice when I got on his shoulder - I didn't make it easy for him to get me down, but he didn't put me on the ground again - just carried me along with him.

After he walked for longer than I'd ranged, there was the glimmer of light on the horizon.  
Around a great fire, there were a collection of low, sullen mud huts. But at least there was a fire - warmth and light that I had forgotten how much I missed.  
In the light I could see how grubby I had become in the grey mud, but it tasted awful when I tried to groom it away. The man was silent - not like the angel, who constantly cooed and fussed over me - but he took me to a small clay basin.

At first I panicked and thought he was going to drop me in the water, but he took out a pale sponge and very gently groomed me clean.  
It turned out that scraps of the slimy lizard things were much nicer when they had been cooked in the fire.  
There were other shapes in the flickering shadows, but they all seemed to avoid him.

It was a little drier and a little cleaner inside the low dome of his hut, and the fire flickered comfortingly through the open windows.  
Sometimes I thought the other worlds had just been a dream.  
I went out hunting for him, and he cleaned me and cooked what I brought back, and for a while we were as content as one could be here.

One day, the angel came back.  
He was visible a long way off. His white chiton was stained grey with the mud and greenish with the blood of the skittering creatures.  
My new human tried to hide me, but I hissed and spat and fought him.  
It was ungrateful of me. He'd done the best he could by me, here. But I wanted so badly to be somewhere else - anywhere else.

I got free and ran out to meet the angel.  
He was as pleased to see me as ever.  
I didn't look back.

The angel seemed to find it hard to draw the portal this time, and it flickered as we stepped through.  
There were a lot of people here. I'd never seen so many.  
They glanced briefly at the angel, but seemed to have a lot of other things on their minds.

My angel just knelt there in the middle of the street for a while.  
He looked kind of exhausted. There were a lot of delicious smells to follow, so I left him for a moment.  
I pounced on something especially delicious looking - a whole fish laid out in a bed of ice. The person behind the display didn't seem to be very pleased, so I dragged it off through the crowd until he stopped chasing me.  
When I looked back, I couldn't see the angel.

At least there was light here, and plenty of good things to eat.  
The people all went inside places as it got darker, and shut their doors while I was preoccupied eating my finds in a quieter alleyway.  
But the cobbles weren't as gritty or awful as the grey mud, and it didn't get that cold, and I amused myself stalking some small furry creatures through the darkness.

It should have been a good life.  
Stealing from the market. Hunting the scavenging rodents when it took my fancy.  
I'd even stolen myself a nice fuzzy blanket and found a cozy hollow to stuff it into, once the nights started getting a little colder.  
But for some reason all of the people ignored me, when they weren't shouting at me.  
And that didn't sit well with me.

I wanted to hear the angel again.  
Or at least someone making soft, adoring noises.  
But I didn't know where to start.

Then, one day, I smelled something familiar.  
It smelled of grey mud and strange lizards and darkness and quiet despair.  
I followed it anyway. I caught a glimpse of him through the crowd and I ran.  
When I got close enough, I leapt and latched onto that long black coat that dragged on the ground.

He plucked me off his coat as gently as he ever had.  
There were still no words, but at least he was paying attention to me, more than just to shoo me away.  
We walked through the market, me riding in his arms, far away from the streets I had made my own.  
There was a big gate, and strange warm creatures that tossed their heads and sighed, and they were hooked up to a box with doors.  
And we went inside the box with doors and nobody chased me out.

When we got out of the box with doors, there were fewer people and more grass.  
The houses kind of reminded me of that long ago wooden hut by the lake, although there were more of them and a sort of dusty street.  
There was no market to steal from, but there were plenty of rodents to chase and even some of the crunchy insects.  
And the man cooked me some fish from time to time.

One morning I came in from hunting to lay down in a sunbeam, and there was the angel.  
He was barely glowing, and laid out on a wooden platform in the middle of the room.  
I curled up between his arm and his body and purred the best purr I had ever purred.  
At first he was very cold, but warmth started to creep back into him as I purred and wound my soft fur against him.

The man came in and fed the angel some soup, and finally he opened his eyes.  
He tried to say the nice things but all that came out was a croak.  
Then the angel tried to sit up and the man gently pushed him back down again and shook his head.

Slowly, the angel got better.  
He was no longer quite so pale, and he started to glow again, and he could whisper about how I was a good cat and the best cat.  
The man still didn't say anything.  
Sometimes the angel tried to get up and walk. He could stumble around the house by holding on to things, but couldn't make it very far.  
I brought him the best rodents but I never saw him eat any of them.  
The man took them off somewhere. Maybe he put them in the soup.

One day the angel scooped me up into his arms.  
I wasn't that used to being carried around any more, but it was the angel, so I trusted him.  
We went out of the door, and down the road, and then off the road into the trees.  
And then, before I could as much as mew a protest - and I'm not sure I would have, I'm afraid - he had opened a portal and we had stepped through.

We came out into a dense jungle.  
It was damper than I liked, but it was teeming with life.  
Some of the life tasted bad, but I was happy and the angel seemed happy too.  
He built himself a little shelter from small springy trees and vines, and made a little fire in it, which I'd not seen him do before.  
That made it a little less damp in there, at least.

Days and nights, and wet seasons and slightly less wet seasons, came and went.  
And then the lady from the wooden hut came, slicing through the jungle with an enormous machete.  
The angel was not happy about it. He made angry words and he made himself big like he was trying to scare her off.  
She was not impressed.

While she was arguing with him, I insinuated myself around her feet, as a kind of apology.  
She made a grab for me, but I was faster. I didn't want her to pick me up and run off with me. That wouldn't have been kind to the angel.  
The angel was very bright now and painful to look at.

When it became clear he wasn't going to scare her off, he scooped me up again - not as carefully as usual - and started to make another portal.  
I was not impressed. I liked it here in the jungle.  
But as he thrust me through the portal, it was quite nice on the other side too. A flower-strewn meadow. Warm sun. Much drier.

Still, I looked at the new world skeptically as he kissed me on the head...


End file.
